Author: Ranjana Das Sarkhel
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527522016
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 151
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Book Description
Chinua Achebe’s novels have always been read as texts from an erstwhile colonised African nation, interpreted within the parameters suggested by postcolonial theorists. The confines of postcolonial readings have raised questions about when the ‘postcolonial’ period would end, so that writers would no longer need to ‘write back’ to the empire or ‘rewrite’ their histories. This work explores how Achebe’s novels articulate his knowledge of his own people and the manner in which he participates in the politics of representation. He critiques the postcolonial methodology, and seeks out, recovers and provides an alternative narrative of the postcolonial experience and its aftermath, even as he seems to be moving beyond it. Achebe’s narratives do not conform to the postcolonial constructs of history as telling (rather than recalling) and of nations in terms of states (rather than people). Achebe combines the techniques available to historians (documentation) with those of novelists (the imaginative re-creation of events) for his fictional evocation of the past. He emphasises both the African artists’ role in helping to create a more egalitarian society and that of the act of storytelling as a shaping force in people’s lives. As he negotiates between his narrative form and realistic subject matter, Achebe puts forward a powerful critique of colonisation and its aftermath. Achebe represents a canonical voice in the emerging discourse of writers struggling to break free from the clichéd world of anti-imperialism and decolonisation.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 0307272907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
From one of the greatest writers of the modern era, an intimate and essential collection of personal essays on home, identity, and colonialism Chinua Achebe’s characteristically eloquent and nuanced voice is everywhere present in these seventeen beautifully written pieces. From a vivid portrait of growing up in colonial Nigeria to considerations on the African-American Diaspora, from a glimpse into his extraordinary family life and his thoughts on the potent symbolism of President Obama’s elections—this charmingly personal, intellectually disciplined, and steadfastly wise collection is an indispensable addition to the remarkable Achebe oeuvre.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0385474547
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.
Author: John Clement Ball
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9780415965934
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
First Published in 2003. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Author: U. R. Anantha Murthy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780195610796
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
Made into a powerful, award-winning film in 1970, this important Kannada novel of the sixties has received widespread acclaim from both critics and general readers since its first publication in 1965. As a religious novel about a decaying brahmin colony in the south Indian village of Karnataka, Samskara serves as an allegory rich in realistic detail, a contemporary reworking of ancient Hindu themes and myths, and a serious, poetic study of a religious man living in a community of priests gone to seed. A death which stands as the central event in the plot brings in its wake a plague, many more deaths, live questions with only dead answers, moral chaos, and the rebirth of one man. The volume provides a useful glossary of Hindu myths, customs, Indian names, flora, and other terms. Notes and an afterword enhance the self-contained, faithful, and yet readable translation.
Author: Elleke Boehmer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319903411
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
Postcolonial Poetics is about how we read postcolonial and world literatures today, and about how the structures of that writing shape our reading. The book’s eight chapters explore the ways in which postcolonial writing in English from various 21st-century contexts, including southern and West Africa, and Black and Asian Britain, interacts with our imaginative understanding of the world. Throughout, the focus is on reading practices, where reading is taken as an inventive, border-traversing activity, one that postcolonial writing with its interests in margins, intersections, subversions, and crossings specifically encourages. This close, sustained focus on reading, reception, and literariness is an outstanding feature of the study, as is its wide generic range, embracing poetry, essays, and life-writing, as well as fiction. The field-defining scholar Elleke Boehmer holds that literature has the capacity to keep reimagining and refreshing how we understand ourselves in relation to the world and to some of the most pressing questions of our time, including resistance, reconciliation, survival after terror, and migration.
Author: Bill Ashcroft
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113446505X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
The experience of colonization and the challenges of a post-colonial world have produced an explosion of new writing in English. This diverse and powerful body of literature has established a specific practice of post-colonial writing in cultures as various as India, Australia, the West Indies and Canada, and has challenged both the traditional canon and dominant ideas of literature and culture. The Empire Writes Back was the first major theoretical account of a wide range of post-colonial texts and their relation to the larger issues of post-colonial culture, and remains one of the most significant works published in this field. The authors, three leading figures in post-colonial studies, open up debates about the interrelationships of post-colonial literatures, investigate the powerful forces acting on language in the post-colonial text, and show how these texts constitute a radical critique of Eurocentric notions of literature and language. This book is brilliant not only for its incisive analysis, but for its accessibility for readers new to the field. Now with an additional chapter and an updated bibliography, The Empire Writes Back is essential for contemporary post-colonial studies.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101666390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 144
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Book Description
From the renowned author of The African Trilogy, a political satire about an unnamed African country navigating a path between violence and corruption As Minister for Culture, former school teacher M. A. Nanga is a man of the people, as cynical as he is charming, and a roguish opportunist. When Odili, an idealistic young teacher, visits his former instructor at the ministry, the division between them is vast. But in the eat-and-let-eat atmosphere, Odili's idealism soon collides with his lusts—and the two men's personal and political tauntings threaten to send their country into chaos. When Odili launches a vicious campaign against his former mentor for the same seat in an election, their mutual animosity drives the country to revolution. Published, prophetically, just days before Nigeria's first attempted coup in 1966, A Man of the People is an essential part of Achebe’s body of work.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Heinemann
ISBN: 9780435905385
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 246
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Book Description
Annotation Achebe writes of the old Africa and the new, tribal warfare and the war that goes on in people's hearts. His story takes place two years after a military coup in the mythical West African state of Kangan, and shows the transformation of a brilliant young.
Author: Chinua Achebe
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101595981
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 354
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Book Description
From the legendary author of Things Fall Apart—a long-awaited memoir of coming of age in a fragile new nation, and its destruction in a tragic civil war For more than forty years, Chinua Achebe maintained a considered silence on the events of the Nigerian civil war, also known as the Biafran War, of 1967–1970, addressing them only obliquely through his poetry. Decades in the making, There Was a Country is a towering account of one of modern Africa’s most disastrous events, from a writer whose words and courage left an enduring stamp on world literature. A marriage of history and memoir, vivid firsthand observation and decades of research and reflection, There Was a Country is a work whose wisdom and compassion remind us of Chinua Achebe’s place as one of the great literary and moral voices of our age.
